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January 1, 2025, 2:45 PM
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Mediagazer
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| Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News: |
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes — The Treasury Department said Iran and Russia sought to divide Americans through targeted disinformation campaigns in the 2024 elections.
More: U.S. Department …, Security Affairs, United States Department …, PCMag, The Hacker News, Notebookcheck, Office of Foreign …, Raw Story, Radio Free Europe/Radio …, TASS, Reuters, The Hill, USA Today, UPI, Al Jazeera, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, IRNA English, Washington Post, Vulnerable U, Reuters, Rolling Stone, CSO, New York Post, CyberScoop, The Times of Israel, The Record, CBS News, Android Headlines, and Engadget
Bluesky: @ecmclaughlin, @cstross.wandering …, @roryflynn808, and @maxbrockbank.com
X: @ustreasury, @ustreasury, @officejjsmart, @ustreasury, @catherinebelton, @ralakbar, @statedeptspox, @iranintl_en, @w7voa, @iranintl_en, and @wendysiegelman. LinkedIn: Brian Cole
| Camilla Hodgson / Financial Times: |
KoBold Metals, which uses AI to sift through historical and scientific data to identify untapped mineral deposits, raised a $537M Series C at a $2.96B valuation — KoBold Metals aims to lead race for critical minerals needed for energy transition — A mining and artificial intelligence start … | Bloomberg: |
Alibaba sells Sun Art Retail stake to PE firm DCP for ~$1.6B, after paying ~$3.6B in 2020 to double the stake to 70%+, as it focuses on its core online business — - Sun Art had attracted interest from other private equity firms … China's e-commerce pioneer said it could receive gross proceeds …
More: Reuters
| Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service: |
A judge blocks parts of California's SB 967, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on “addictive feeds” for minors — Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday. — A federal judge on Tuesday barred the state of California … | Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: |
OpenAI missed its goal to launch Media Manager, an opt-out tool for creators, by 2025; sources: the tool was rarely viewed as an important launch internally — Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data.| Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: |
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing Softchoice at ~CA$1.8B — One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024. — On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis … | Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: |
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived — A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here's a review of things we figured …
More: Don't Worry About the Vase. Bluesky: @philipmai.com, @randomwalker, @jweiss.io, @anildash.com, @aleximas, @randfish, and @simon.fedi.simonwillison …. Mastodon: @eloquence@social.coop
Forums: Hacker News, r/programming, and lobste.rs
| Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: |
Researchers find 4.5M “stars” on GitHub repos they suspect are fake; in July, Check Point found a network of inauthentic users starring repos containing malware — GitHub has a problem with inauthentic “stars” used to artificially inflate the popularity of scam …
More: arXiv.org, WinBuzzer, and How-To Geek
Bluesky: @bagder.mastodon.social …, @carnage4life, @joshgrant.online, and @quinnypig.com. Mastodon: @bagder@mastodon.social
| Sylvia Pfeifer / Financial Times: |
The defense industry is poised for a deal surge as firms expand in AI, drones, and space systems; Bain: VC deal value in the sector has risen 18x in a decade — Large contractors expected to use growing cash piles to invest in high-growth areas — Defence companies are primed for a surge …
More: Bain and Cryptopolitan
| Ernesto Van der Sar / TorrentFreak: |
Link-Busters, an anti-piracy company working for big publishers, passed 2B URL takedown requests sent to Google and is behind 50%+ of Google takedown requests — Online piracy is a constant headache for copyright holders; one that's particularly hard to beat.| New York Times: |
An investigation details how predatory men engage in the grooming of child influencers on Instagram under the guise of working as social media professionals — Photographers and other men offer to build online followings for young girls, but some are pedophiles who work with parents to sexualize them.
More: The Verge, TechCrunch, and HotAir
Bluesky: @paramjitkahai, @justinm.one, @rweingarten, @shevotesil, @catmcamp, and @cecillia.com.br
X: @alleighmarre, @ttp_updates, @ttp_updates, and @ttp_updates
| George Hammond / Financial Times: |
PitchBook: the number of VCs investing in US startups fell from a peak of 8,315 in 2021 to 6,175 in 2024; 9 firms raised 50%+ of the $71B raised by VCs in 2024 — Risk-averse financial institutions concentrate money on biggest Silicon Valley VCs in trend that threatens smaller groups
Bluesky: @radiobeartime.com
| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
India removes a 100M user cap on WhatsApp Pay, letting Meta roll out the mobile payments service to all of its 500M+ users in the country — India has removed restrictions on WhatsApp's mobile payments service in a significant victory for Meta in its largest market by users as it seeks to compete with entrenched fintech rivals.| Manish Singh / TechCrunch: |
More: Moneycontrol, Trak.in, Times of India, Reuters, Tech in Asia, Inc42 Media, The Economic Times, and YourStory.com
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